What does UCLA basketball need to do to make the NCAA Tournament?

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File photo: UCLA head coach Steve Alford and the Bruins are on the bubble for this year’s NCAA Tournament, but have no room for error if it wants to make it to big dance. (Photo by Michael Owen Baker/Los Angeles Daily News)

Less than five weeks ago, UCLA’s season lay in the emergency room — sucking fierce gulps out of the ventilator, tapping for high-pitched beeps on the heart monitor.

The Bruins had dropped five straight, mostly in embarrassing fashion: a 13-point loss to Gonzaga at home that never looked close; a 39-point loss to Kentucky that featured a historically awful first half; six-point losses at Alabama and Colorado; a 32-point loss at Utah.

UCLA was mired in its longest losing streak in half a decade. For many Bruin fans, thoughts of March Madness sounded laughable.

On Jan. 6, Tony Parker stood before a small throng of reporters at Pauley Pavilion. One asked if the team was in danger of missing the Big Dance. The junior big man gave one of the few candid — albeit still understated — answers that day.

“That’s definitely in question,” he said then. “You have to win games to make the tournament. That’s a big-time thing for us. We have to win games to make the tournament.”

They’ve done that, to some extent. UCLA (15-10, 7-5) has won seven of its last 10, carving out a tenuous spot on the NCAA tournament bubble. During that stretch, it has become more capable on defense and discovered a relatively successful inside-out attack on offense. Two of those losses came without Parker, who sat out losses at Oregon State and Oregon with back spasms. The 6-foot-9 center isn’t a bona fide star, but his team is 4-2 against conference opponents when he scores in double digits.

Bracketologists are starting to look kindly on the Bruins, who are down but not out, bent but not broken. ESPN projects them as a No. 11 seed, while FOX Sports puts them at No. 12. Both slotted the team into a play-in game, also known as the “first round.”

With six regular-season games left, UCLA doesn’t room for error.

“This is playoff basketball for us,” said point guard Bryce Alford. “We’ve talked about it. It’s a three-week grind of straight playoff basketball. … We’ve looked at the standings. We know where we’re at, and we like where we’re at. We’re in a good spot to make a run at it.”

Might 20 regular-season wins be enough to clinch a berth? Let’s take a look at recent Pac-12 history.

Before the 2006-07 season, the NCAA abolished its “two-in-four” rule, allowing teams to play more nonconference tournaments and making 31-game regular seasons the norm.

Since then, 22 teams in this conference have notched between 20 and 22 regular-season wins.

Of those, only seven missed the NCAA tournament. Five of those absences can be traced to the disastrous 2011-12 season, when the Pac-12 was regarded as the worst major conference in the country — ranking 10th in conference RPI, behind the likes of the Atlantic 10 and the Missouri Valley Conference. It sent just two representatives into March Madness. For the first time since 1958, not even the regular-season champion (Washington) earned a spot.

This year has not been a banner one for the conference, but it is also not on the verge of implosion. The Pac-12 currently plods along at fifth in conference RPI, and could conceivably place four or five teams into the field of 68.

A 20-game winner in this Pac-12 would have better than coin-flip odds at the tourney. For UCLA, that would mean sweeping its remaining home games — Oregon, Washington, Washington State, USC — and at least splitting its trip to Arizona State and No. 7 Arizona.

“We’ve done a lot of work in the last two weeks to kind of set ourselves up for the last three-week stretch,” said head coach Steve Alford. “A lot of teams throughout the country, they’re waiting on conference tournaments to make it happen.

“We’re three weeks to conclusion and we’re still in the mix. We’re still fighting. That’s always exciting.”

Jack Wang covers the Chargers, the latest NFL team to relocate to Los Angeles. He previously covered the Rams, and also spent four years on the UCLA beat, a strange period in which the Bruins' football program often outpaced their basketball team. He is a proud graduate of UC Berkeley, where he spent most of his time in The Daily Californian offices in Eshleman Hall — a building that did not become earthquake-safe until after his time on campus.